The Role of Prosody in English Sentence Processing: Evidence from L1-Korean EFL Learners

Abstract

This study investigates Korean L1 speakers' preference for prosodic as opposed to syntactic cues in English sentence processing. The participants were 63 middle school second graders and 70 high school second graders in Seoul, Korea, including both male and female students with different English proficiency levels. The competing cues task and the comprehension time task were conducted to explore the role of prosody in English sentence processing. In the competing cues task, it was generally the case that learners did not primarily attend to syntax when processing English sentences. Instead, all groups of learners were much more likely to attend to prosody. In the comprehension time task, the sentences with cooperating prosody needed significantly less comprehension time than sentences with conflicting prosody in all groups. This suggests that the recognition of prosodic features is an influential factor in English sentence processing.